The present invention relates to firmware management of storage class memory.
Technologies behind solid-state nonvolatile read access memory (RAM), which are collectively referred to as storage class memory (SCM), are rapidly maturing. As a result, SCM is beginning to appear in enterprise-class mainframe servers. For example, SCM may be used as a physical replacement for mechanical-arm spinning disks with the SCM interface being similar to that of the more traditional direct access storage devices (DASDs). However, because of dramatically different performance characteristics between SCM and DASDs, new applications may use SCM more like an extended memory and would derive benefit from a mechanism that hides DASD implementation and deployment details. Also, reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) characteristics of off-the-shelf SCM offerings may require enhancements to make them more appropriate for an enterprise-class computing environment.